With Gov. Rick Perry officially in the race for the Republican nomination, Believe It or Not will continue to track how his religious background plays a role in the campaign, especially as Perry’s appeal to evangelicals gets national attention.

Evangelical pastor Jim Garlow has met Texas Gov. Rick Perry only once, but the politician left quite an impression.

Garlow, who is based in California, where he helped lead the campaign to ban same-sex marriage in the state, was attending a big prayer rally that Perry sponsored last weekend in Houston when he and his wife were invited backstage with the governor.

“My wife has stage 4 cancer, and Perry ended up talking with her quite a bit and praying for her and her healing,” Garlow said. “We spent a fair amount of time backstage.”

CNN Belief reports that Perry’s evangelical supporters aren’t just happy to see the governor gather people around prayer. Politically, he’s also passed anti-abortion legislation and wants to ban same-sex marriage.

Here in Texas, many Christians are excited that the governor has set his eyes on the White House. He is considered to be a strong Christian and not one who merely uses his faith for political gain, said Jim Denison of the Denison Forum on Truth and Culture in Dallas.

The National Association of Evangelicals’ pick, Tim Pawlenty, is out of the race after a weak performance in this weekend’s Iowa Straw Poll. Although Michele Bachmann is certainly winning over some of the big evangelical voting block, Perry might be the Republican hero some Christian voters have been holding out for.

Bachmann, in other words, is a product of the religious right’s deliberate efforts to “raise up” soldiers to exercise a “dominion mandate;” she is, organically, one of them. Perry’s (announcement) Saturday, on the other hand, was a staged attempt to convince them that he is committed to their worldview. It’s not clear that he has internalized it like Bachmann has, which may make him more Zelig-like and attractive to non-religious voters in states like New Hampshire, or might make him look like a pandering interloper to everyone. One thing is clear, though: the dominionism that we chroniclers of the religious right have talked about for years is now becoming a mainstream topic of scrutiny and conversation. Finally.